Do personal essays still matter? It’s a question Daum takes up in “The Catastrophe Hour,” her new collection of … personal essays, written before catastrophe hit close to home. SCOTT HELLER
What kind of reader were you as a child?
In elementary school I was very competitive and was always neck and neck with some other overachieving girl for “most books read.” At some point it expanded into magazines, first teen magazines then Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Esquire. At around 15, I discovered Film Comment in the town library and checked out every issue I could get my hands on, after which I would fill out request cards for VHS tapes of movies I read about.
Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
Ellen Conford was a young adult author whose books I remember as humorous in a satirical and slyly adult way. One of the earliest I remember was “Felicia the Critic,” about a girl who had an opinion about everything and assumed everyone wanted to hear it. Come to think of it, someone might have given me that book for a reason.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
I guess “ideal” would be in a cozy cottage on some snowy mountaintop with nary a Zoom meeting on the calendar. Barring that, I do my best, or at least most concentrated, reading on airplanes. When traveling, I used to enjoy eating alone at hotel bars with a book, not least because it was a conversation starter. But somewhere along the line, the book became a phone and conversations never got started. I feel like if you were to read a book at a bar today, the book would almost look like a prop. How sad is that? That might be the saddest sentence I’ve written all year.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
I would tell you but I’m too embarrassed.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
There’ve been so many. The most recent book was a copy of the Billy Graham Training Center Bible from a group of church volunteers who helped my neighbors and me sift through the ashes of what used to be our houses before the L.A. wildfires. I haven’t read it yet, but they were some of the kindest and most physically resilient people I’ve ever met. And hats off to them for getting so many secular Angelenos to hold hands and pray!
How are you thinking about replacing books you lost in the fire?
Funny you should ask. So many writers lost their homes and possessions in the fires. This gave me an idea. What if we helped writers rebuild their libraries by connecting them with those who appreciate them the most — their readers? Surely readers would love nothing more than to send their favorite books to their favorite writers. The way I imagine it, writers would create registries of the books they miss the most and readers could either pick from the list or send a book of their own choosing, or both. It’s win/win. Writers can begin to fill their shelves and readers get the pleasure of sharing books they love with writers they love. Along the way, everyone discovers new books. I’m still figuring out the logistics, but I think this could be great.
You wrote a column on memoirs for the Book Review. That was work. Do you still read them, for pleasure?
I have a lot of memoir authors on my podcast and I almost always enjoy reading their books, so I count that as pleasure. I’m always delighted to interview a celebrity whose memoir is genuinely well written; Moon Unit Zappa and Maria Bamford come to mind. Hadley Freeman’s memoir about anorexia, “Good Girls,” was astonishingly good. I consider my interview with the economist Glenn Loury about his memoir, “Late Admissions,” to be one of the best I’ve done.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Tim Kreider’s essay collections, “We Learn Nothing” and “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You,” are masterpieces of the form, start to finish. I wouldn’t say no one has heard of them, since many of the pieces he’s written for the Times opinion page have gone viral. But Tim should be on every serious reader’s shelf.
“Everything is personal, so nothing is personal,” you write in your book. What does that mean for a personal essayist?
That’s from the final essay in the collection, which is also the newest essay. It wrestles with how first-person writing, or personal creative expression of any kind, has been sullied by the collective exhibitionism of social media and meme culture. Readers today (I guess they’re not so much readers but “consumers of content”) frequently lack the intellectual programming to tell the difference between a carefully crafted and rigorously edited personal essay and a TikTok video of someone crying in her car. That’s why I write, “First, the personal became political. Then it became porn. Now it has become dust.” Not that people shouldn’t read this book of personal essays.
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